Tag: Freeware

Did you ever read comic books when you were younger? Maybe, you are like me, and you will never grow out of enjoying a good comic book. If that’s the case, you may want to read and collect comic books on your computer.

Recently, I spotted a post at How To Geek about a great comic book viewer for Ubuntu Linux, called Comix. I tried it out and I was not disappointed. Comix is already in the Ubuntu Software Center, and you don’t have to work hard to find it.

Typically, I spend most of my time on Windows computers, and I wondered if there was a good comic book reader for XP, Vista and Seven. I found the answer very fast on Google. There’s a great viewer for Windows and Mac, called Comical. It’s an Open Source project, and fairly new, but it makes viewing comic book files pretty simple.

Autodetects double pages scanned together and displays it accordingly.

Page rotation.

Full-Screen mode.

Left-to-Right or Right-to-Left browsing.

Displays JPG, GIF, and PNG images.

Supports RAR(.cbr) and ZIP(.cbz) comic book archives.

Supports all encrypted RAR archives as well as ZIP archives with pkzip 2.04g encryption.

I’ll take a moment to explain the two file types .CBR and .CBZ, that are mentioned above. CBZ means Comic Book ZIPped, and CBR means Comic Book RARed. Both of those are simple archives of images. Therefore, the Comical viewer is a great tool for viewing any collection of images that is archived as a ZIP or RAR file.

Searching online, you’ll find that most of the comic books there are pirated copies and are located in places that are not always safe to visit. Please be extremely cautious while looking for free comic books. I recommend using the WOT addon for filtering out risky search results.

When People Can Fly studios released their First Person Shooter (FPS) parody Duty Calls (directly mocking the Call of Duty series), they just wanted it to be a satirical view on the realisticFPS genre and an anti-demo for their game Bulletstorm. Basically, what they were saying is that our game, Bulletstorm, is not this game. It is definitely everything but this game. Look at this game. This game is stupid. You know which game we are talking about, right? Yes, that game., more or less.

If you are someone who does not like to use development software but can use beta software, here is some good news. Google just announced that they are releasing Google Chrome 10 to the beta channel with the new Crankshaft technology.

As I had confirmed earlier, this new build is twice as fast as Google Chrome 9 and makes browsing a breeze. Chrome 10 beta also introduces GPU-accelerated video which makes uses of your graphics hardware to display videos and decreases CPU usage. Google claims that full screen video will decrease by almost 80% in Chrome 10 beta.

Google Chrome 10 also includes the ability to sync your passwords along with bookmarks, preferences, themes and extensions. Google also provides users with the ability to encrypt the passwords with your own sync passphrase ensuring security for your stored data.

The settings/preferences has also been moved to its own page just like it is in the Google Chrome OS that is used on the Cr-48 netbooks. Overall, the release of Google Chrome 10 beta brings a lot of goodies your way and brings it close to a stable release. If you are using Google Chrome beta, go to Settings -> About and Check for Updates to upgrade to the latest version.

After releasing Opera 11, the team at Opera are working hard to push for the next release touted as Opera 11.10 "Barracuda"; named after a fish known for its large size and fearsome appearance. Today, the Opera team have released the first snapshot of the latest version.

Don’t get put off by the large size of the fish though. My first impression was something that I have hardly seen with browsers. The installation of Opera 11.10 "Barracuda" was blazing fast, it hardly took 10 seconds, this is not the case for other browsers.

Other than that I found an improved experience in browsing webpages and watching videos including HTML5 videos. There aren’t any more visible changes with this build and it does support Opera extensions as in Opera 11.

In this release, Opera has upgraded Core from version 2.7.62 to 2.8.99 which includes the implementation of the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) which is a font format for use in web pages. The new format hasn’t been ratified by the W3C yet, but once it is done, it will become the interoperable font format which will be supported by all browsers.

In addition to that, there are several other changes in this build, which include:

Disable Cookie2 by default, with an option to enable it again

Send more compatible Accept header on second request

Disable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 by default

Make sure redirects from http to https are labeled secure

Remove the use of master password for client certificates

Added a preference to disable cross-network protection

The Alpha release of Opera 11.10 "Barracuda" is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/FreeBSD. You can download the files from the links below.

Alpha software is usually not advisable to install for regular users, however, unlike other browsers, you can install multiple version of Opera on your PC. Each version has their own profile, better still you can just install Opera as a Portable Software. I am still using the browser to find what improvements have been made over Opera 11. Will do a review of the Alpha release soon.

As many of you have learned by now, not all free screensavers are created equal. Many times, free means that you have to install stupid toolbars, adware and other unwanted junk along with the screensaver. That’s not true of the ones at NewFreeScreensavers.

One of the nice features of these screensavers is that they now have settings to mute the sounds. Some of the screensavers also have a setting to include a small analog clock on the screen.

I’ve downloaded and installed several of the screensavers at this site and never had a problem with any of them. These screensavers are safe, totally free, and there are dozens more to check out once you visit.

There are sometimes when you may come across websites whose content may not really be that good but who show up in the Google searches you undertake. Now, there is no easy way to get rid of those results unless you filter them out using some sort of user scripts.

However, starting today, Google is making it easier for users to start blocking websites from their search results with the help of a Google Chrome extension called Personal Blocklist. Using this Google Chrome extension users can easily block websites from appearing in search results. Once a website has been blocked, they will not appear in Google searches you make in future.

When you block or unblock a website, the extension will send information about the URL to Google. There is no way you can change this behavior.

You can also unblock the websites by clicking on the extension icon and unblocking the website. Overall this is a good feature if you want to remove some sites from search results.

Problems With Extension

If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

This would definitely not be a really great idea, because people will then just start paying others to install the extension and start blocking their competitors websites. If Google starts using such data for ranking search results, it would be a disaster at best. I would prefer using the extension as a personal choice rather than overall Google rankings.

If you are interested in trying out the extension you can download it from here.

Minus provides a simple way to share your images and files online with an easy to use drag and drop interface. You can simply drag a file from your computer and drop it on the Min.us website and it will automatically start uploading the content. Once the upload is complete, you can then easily share the image or file online using the link provided by Minus.

Minus also provides desktop tools for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The desktop tools also provide an easy way to drag and drop files to upload them to Min.us. It also provides a sharing tool for Android with support for iPhone and Blackberry coming soon. If you want to upload files using your browser, Minus provides a Google ChromeExtension with support for Firefox coming soon. All these tools can be downloaded from http://min.us/pages/tools.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Overall Minus is a great app which allows you to quickly share files and images without the hassles. I could not find any easier way to share content online.

What I would like to see though is the ability to easily post the uploaded images to Facebook and Twitter within the app, that would make it perfect. So go ahead and start sharing your content with ease at http://min.us/

Win Rumors spotted the downloads for the Internet Explorer 9 and posted links to the downloads before Microsoft made them available officially. Internet Explorer 9 includes tracking protection which was also recently included by Firefox and Google Chrome. Using this privacy feature, users can opt-out of advertising tracking cookies and analytic software tracking.

Internet Explorer 9 will most likely see a full public release by the end of February and it might roll out after the Windows 7 service pack 1 has been made available to users.

You can download the Internet Explorer 9 RC from the links below, courtesy Win Rumors.

When People Can Fly studios released their First Person Shooter (FPS) parody Duty Calls (directly mocking the Call of Duty series), they just wanted it to be a satirical view on the realisticFPS genre and an anti-demo for their game Bulletstorm. Basically, what they were saying is that our game, Bulletstorm, is not this game. It is definitely everything but this game. Look at this game. This game is stupid. You know which game we are talking about, right? Yes, that game., more or less.

It is, in essence, a rather large (~800MB), ESRB rated 17+ (or so their website claims) game that parodies the Call of Duty games, and is pretty funny while doing it. Coming from the folks that created Painkiller and Gears of War, it is a pretty bold move to reclaim the First Person Shooter market dynamics. It was, in a sense, and advertisement for their game too as I have made it clear with my inherent knowledge of psychology, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, psychogeography and other psycho subjects in the first paragraph.

The developers were (obviously) very happy with this, and decided to enthusiastically tweet about the success of Duty Calls. How best to celebrate this grand success, you ask? By releasing Bulletstorm wallpapers, naturally:-

Valentine’s day is only a week away, and a new sweet screensaver might make your favorite geek, a grateful geek. You’ll find plenty of free screensavers and wallpapers on the net, but you have to be careful to visit only safe websites when you are looking for them.

As many of you have learned by now, not all free screensavers are created equal. Many times, free means that you have to install stupid toolbars, adware and other unwanted junk along with the screensaver. That’s not true of the ones at NewFreeScreensavers.

The latest 10 screensavers now brings the total to 35 Valentine themes on the download page.

One of the nice features of these screensavers is that they now have settings to mute the sounds. Some of the screensavers also have a setting to include a small analog clock on the screen.

I’ve downloaded and installed several of the screensavers at this site and never had a problem with any of them. These screensavers are safe, totally free, and there are dozens more to check out once you visit.